Decluttering for a Simpler Christmas: Toys

Do you feel overwhelmed at Christmas with all the extra “stuff” in your home? One of the best ways to simplify Christmas is to declutter in the weeks leading up to it.  

Today I’m sharing tips to help you declutter toys.  It’s so important to purge some of your kids’ toys before the influx of new toys at Christmas.

When kids have too many choices, they get overwhelmed and don’t end up playing with more than a few of them. Lots of toys also makes cleaning up and keeping your home organized much more challenging. Decluttering toys from time to time also helps our kids know that things don’t have to stay in our lives forever but can be enjoyed for a period of time and then passed on.

Here are some suggestions for toys you can purge:

• Toys your kids have outgrown
• Toys they haven’t played with in a long time
• Toys that are broken
• Toys with missing pieces
• Big toys that take up a lot of space
• Little toys that they’ve forgotten about
• Toys that have corroded batteries (they definitely haven’t been played with in awhile!)

Examples of toys I’ve decluttered:

I usually got my kids involved in decluttering their toys about 1-2 times per year. We usually went through their toy bins in the basement before Christmas, which is where most of their toys are kept. 

Here’s what their overflowing toy bins looked like before we started one year.

And…

I like these bins because they are open and the kids can see their toys.  I also don’t like these bins because they are open and everyone else can see their toys!  But, my daughter is very visual, and having her toys out in the open encouraged her to play with them more. So we stuck with this system for several years.

My son sometimes had a hard time decluttering and always said everything was special to him. I tried to help him understand that when everything is important, nothing is important.  But he had a hard time prioritizing what toys were more special than others, which made it hard to part with any of them.  So I got creative.

I asked the kids to pull out all their very favourite toys (about 5-10 each).  They had no problems deciding on those.  We called those #1 toys.  Then I asked them to make another pile of their next favourite toys.  We called them #2 toys.  Next we made a pile of #3 toys. 

I also asked them to make a pile of any toys they wanted to give away or sell.  They did OK with this but once they prioritized their toys, I was able to help them purge a few more from the remaining toys and even from their #3 piles.

This process also helped them see that I understand they have favourite toys and I’m not forcing them to get rid of any of them.  But it also helped them recognize that not all their toys are really favourites. 

Here’s a bag of toys they decluttered that year.

Once we’d decided which toys were being kept, we re-sorted them into categories.  Each category got a bin.

The “after” pictures are much less cluttered. They had room for the new toys they received that Christmas, and learned a bit about how to declutter.

This was just an example from one decluttering project (sort of like a case study). But most years were fairly similar after that. They actually got much better the more they did it!

For specific tips on decluttering toys, check out my Decluttering Toys post from the 31 Days of Easy Decluttering series.

If you need help decluttering, contact me for in-person organizing services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else.

Happy decluttering!